


Greek Tragedy

by raewastaken (IWriteLove)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bucky's Left Arm is Covered in Tattoos, Childhood Friends, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Steve Rogers, Organized Crime, Slow Burn, Steve is a cop, Trans Bucky Barnes, Trans Male Character, others make appearances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 17:16:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9832991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IWriteLove/pseuds/raewastaken
Summary: While every other officer seems to be selling out and taking bribes from the mysterious, and dubious, Hydra Corporation, Steve Rogers seems like the only honest cop left in New York City. Bribery and Hydra are the last thing on his mind when a deadly and infamous mercenary going only by "The Winter Soldier" shows up and starts causing problems in his work life. He's positive it's a coincidence that his childhood best friend - and childhood crush - Bucky Barnes rolls back into their hometown at the same time. He's 100% sure.(He's not.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pumpkaboos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pumpkaboos/gifts).



> i've had this au planned out in my head for literal MONTHS but i've been suffering from writers block for so long i finally got a chance to write it oh my GOD. i'm so alive but i'm also dying. its terrible.
> 
> anyway i made [this graphic](http://milessqueak.tumblr.com/post/150732749371/peakesqueak-miles-never-ending-list-of-aus) like. back last august for this au. this is where it all began. its grown. a LOT since then. mostly the progression of bucky and steve? i think i would live and die for trans dude bucky now. so you cant escape it. i'm also trans myself, so to write trans characters is like.........kind of cathartic? 
> 
> shoutout to my girlfriend, [jordy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Pumpkaboos/pseuds/Pumpkaboos), who brought me down into stucky hell in the first place.......thanks babe.......ur the best. this fic is a gift to u babe.......

**New York City | 1993**

Steve Rogers is six when he meets his best friend.

The apartment across the hall had been buzzing with activity the morning Sarah Rogers had ushered him out for school with his Dragon Ball backpack in her hands, prattling off about his inhalers and his medicines, a checklist only she could keep up with. He had opted to stare at the large men moving boxes and broken down furniture into the once empty apartment, before she had quite literally pushed him down the hall instead, chiding him gently about how he was going to be late if he kept getting distracted. Of course, his attention span and train of thought quickly forgot about it halfway through his first hour at school, stuck in a whirlwind of classwork and math he just seemed to get confused on, and it didn’t enter his mind again until the bus dropped him off in front of his apartment building. The moving truck from this morning was gone from the curb, replaced by a shiny red car with a few boxes packed into the space behind the back seat and strapped to the top with rope. Steve stared for a moment, before he turned and ran into his building, pressing the button for the elevator so quickly the employee usually sitting behind the front desk, an older man who was good friends with Sarah, chuckled. “In a hurry kid?”

“Yes!” he said quickly, trying to squeeze through the partially open doors and pressing his floor’s number frantically. Steve had a curiosity streak in him, always getting into things he shouldn’t have, just to say he knew what it was all about. And there was nothing more intriguing than the vacant apartment across the hall that had been empty for as long as he could remember finally housing someone. He wondered, distantly, if it was a family, if they had a kid, if the kid was his age. He bounced on the pads of his feet, the adrenaline rushing through him making his lungs feel tight, knowing he’d get scolded for working himself up for seemingly no reason, but he felt that it was a big reason.

The elevator stopped on his floor, and he impatiently left, walking quickly back to his apartment, stopping when he rounded the corner. There were boxes stacked up in the corner by the door, big arrows drawn pointing up, name’s scribbled onto the sides (“Winifred”, “Rebecca”, “Jamie”, “George”) of each, some of them half opened with a few things pulled out, probably in an attempt to settle in faster than the unpacking was going. But the boxes weren’t what caught Steve’s eye. 

On top of one labeled “Rebecca” sat a girl around Steve’s age, clad in overalls and a Mario shirt. She had her dark brown hair in pigtails, feet kicking in the air and bouncing off the side of the cardboard, her freckled (and bandaged) nose buried in the grey GameBoy she held, although Steve could see stickers stuck all over the back. He stared, hands tight on his backpack’s straps, before she looked up, probably sensing his staring, and- wow. Her eyes were pretty, the kind of blue Steve usually saw in cartoons for ice and snow. They stared at each other for a moment, before she smiled so wide that Steve can see the gap where one of her front teeth should be, and his face lit up red. “Hi!”

“H-Hi,” Steve stuttered, hands fidgeting. “A-Are you new?”

“Yeah! I just moved in today! Daddy said he saw a boy my age leaving this morning, I guess that was you?” she asked, setting her GameBoy to the side and focusing all her attention on him. It made him squirm a bit.

“Um, yeah. I live across the hall,” he told her, pointing at his apartment door.

Her face lit up and she jumped down from the boxes. “Oh wow! We should be friends since we live so close! My name is Jamie Barnes!” She stuck out her left hand, where Steve can see the fading lines of multicolor marker drawings littering her arm.

“S-Steve. Rogers,” he said, nervously, taking her hand and smiling at her. “A-And we should. Be friends.”

Jamie seemed to like this, and her smile, somehow, got larger. “Great!” she said happily, before there was a call of her name from inside her apartment. “Oh, I should go help. My sister Rebecca and I are sharing a room and she probably wants to tell me not to touch her stuff,” she mumbled, sticking her tongue out. “But I’ll see you around, Steve!”

It felt like a whirlwind when she ran back inside her apartment, leaving Steve standing alone in the hallway with the feel of her hand dug into his brain and a smile on his face.

He went to bed with a smile that night.

 

* * *

**1996**

Jamie is a year younger than him, but they’re in the same grade.

Steve doesn’t think it’s weird; that’s how it is for him, how it has been since he started school. He’s always sick, always has been, so halfway through kindergarten he was out for two months while he was stuck in the hospital battling all sorts of nasty things, and ended up failing the grade due to lack of attendance. It had sucked, being a six year old in kindergarten, already knowing how to write his name and count to twenty, from his mom tutoring him on his good days in the hospital, but when Jamie transferred into his class a few days after they met, it became bearable.

Well, maybe for  _ him _ . They were a nightmare together, starting in that kindergarten class and onward. Steve had hardly been an angel, but never having a partner in crime kind of kept him in line, kept his fists in his pockets and temper in check, but Jamie being pulled into his brand of mischief, and being there as someone to bail him out when things got rough, spurred on the trouble. Winifred Barnes constantly seemed worn out and down by Jamie’s constant troublemaking, and while Sarah scolded Steve for talking during class and picking fights on the playground, she seemed relieved that Steve had more than passing classroom friendships for once. Jamie didn’t seem phased by any of it, always flashing wide toothy smiles at him, even after the time she ended up face planting the gravel on the playground and ended up with a cut across the bridge of her nose. Steve would be lying if he said he didn’t start nursing a small crush on her. He lied to just about everyone anyway.

Jamie didn’t come into school that day, though. She never showed up that morning in front of their building for the bus, leaving Steve standing in the cold alone with an extra PopTart stuffed into his pocket in a plastic bag. At school, the desk next to him in Mrs. Munroe’s third grade class sat empty the entire day, his left side silent and during recess he sat on the swing alone, and didn’t bother causing any trouble. Everything felt off, through math and science and reading and music. He didn’t have anyone to push his carrots off onto at lunch, no one to steal potato chips from. When it was finally time to head home, he felt relieved but weird. The old man at the front desk looked confused when Steve walked in alone and got the elevator up to his floor, not used to seeing just one of them nowadays. It was a quiet walk to his apartment, probably to the relief of the rest of the tenants on his floor, but when he got to his door, Jamie was sitting in front of it, knees drawn up to her chest and chin resting on her knees, but she looked up when she saw Steve, eyes shimmering with tears. “Jamie? Why weren’t you at school?”   
  
She ran her hoodie’s sleeve across her face, sniffling softly. “Sorry,” she said quietly. Steve sat down next to her, setting his bag to the side. “I didn’t feel…. I mean I didn’t want…“ she trailed off, before sniffling again and rubbing her eyes. “My dad’s leaving.”

Steve sat silent, but he felt like his heart was falling apart. George Barnes was a good man, and a good dad, and seemed to like Steve well enough since him and Jamie became friends. He had never seen a side of the man that didn’t love Jamie and Rebecca both. “What?”   
  
“Him and my mom, they just… They don’t think it’s good if they stay together,” she said. “So dad’s moving out. He’s going to live in Manhattan, so he won’t be far but… I don’t want him to move at all.”

He thought back to the blurry day when he was five, right before he started getting sick all the time, when his dad left for work with a kiss for his mom and a bear hug for him, putting on his NYPD badge and leaving out the door to their apartment. He remembered how he didn’t want his dad to go that day, how he cried and begged him to stay home and play video games with him, but he had been silence with a gentle “we can play when I get home, buddy”, and it had been left at that. His dad didn’t come home that night. The next morning his partner came to the door with the news that left his mother crying in heap on the floor. Steve decided that day he wanted to be a police officer, too. And Steve knows how Jamie feels.

“You’ll be able to see him,” Steve told her. “Like… You can take the train out there with Becca. He won’t be far away.”

Jamie stared at him, sniffled once, then rubbed her eyes again. “Yeah,” she said softly. “S-Sorry. It just sucks, you know?”

“Yeah.”

They sit in silence, before Jamie stands on shaky legs, her knees still covered in scrapes from their skateboarding attempts the other day. “I should probably get back in,” she said, brushing her shorts off. “And I’m sure your mom wants you in, too.”   
  
“Oh. Yeah.” Steve stood as well, sighing. “Probably. Do you want to come over for video games?”   
  
“Nah, I think I’ll stay home and spend time with my dad,” Jamie told him, walking over to her door and stopping, taking a shaky breath. “And, hey, Steve?”   
  
Steve turned, seeing her looking at him, her cheeks slightly red. “Um. Yes?”   
  
“Thanks.”

She went into her apartment without another word. Steve felt as lost as he did grounded.

 

* * *

 

** 1999 **

Peggy Carter transferred into their school their sixth grade year. She had curly brown hair and brown eyes, and an accent that made Steve’s inside feel like they were melting. She was intelligent and quiet, but had this look about her that made her feel intense. Like, if she wasn’t an eleven year old in a New York City middle school, she’d be a secret agent with bright red lipstick and a gun, or something. According to her mini introduction at the beginning of English, she moved from England to New York with her brother, Michael, sister in law and newborn niece, Sharon. Steve must have been staring at her for too long with his jaw hanging slightly open, because he had felt Jamie reach over and push him so hard he almost fell out of his desk.

Peggy Carter had stared at him for the rest of the class after.

Being twelve was weird to him, anyway. He was just on the cusp of not being in the hospital all the time, but his asthma was still pretty bad, usually having him sitting out in gym after running for too long. He was scrawny, compared to every other boy in his grade, but seemed to be gaining more muscle and fat than he had before. Jamie spent more time at his apartment than her own, but sometimes in the morning she left for school and he could hear her new stepfather, Jonathan, raising his voice in the kitchen, so he didn’t blame her. Her personality, while still charming and dazzling like when they were kids, had started to mellow out the older they got; she wasn’t as loud as before, but was still ready to follow Steve into trouble to get him out or help him. But it seemed like she was constantly being flocked to by boys. Steve tried to ignore the way he felt hot under the collar whenever he saw her casually flirting with a boy, because he didn’t want to admit that crush he had been harboring on her never went away.

And besides, Steve was being a hypocrite. 

Peggy leaned back against the lockers while he pulled out his textbooks, ignoring how his stomach was fluttering with butterflies. “Did you finish the homework for French?” she asked. “I got stuck in the middle of the second page. I don’t think Mr. LeBeau ever taught us that?”   
  
“Oh, uh I-I sorta finished it,” he told her, closing his locker and spinning the combination dial. “Jamie came over for Mario Kart and-”

Speak of the devil. Jamie came walking over, head held high. “So! Guess we’re all in French together now!”

Steve stood in stunned silence, hands tight on his French book, before he frowned. “What?”   
  
“Barnes, I didn’t know you spoke French,” Peggy said, smirking gently at him.

“I don’t, but I’m going to!”   
  
“What lead you to wanting to speak French?” Steve asked as the three of them started to head down the hallway. “Thought you were taking Spanish because you could just cheat off Rebecca’s old homework.”

“You know Gabe and Jacques from my gym class? Well they both know French and I sit between them half the time and never know what they’re saying. It’s kind of annoying.”

Peggy snorted into her hand. “So you want to learn French to eavesdrop?”

Jamie shrugged. “Well when you put it that way…”

Steve didn’t want to think about Jamie speaking French. Listening to Peggy speak French was enough. He was prepared for death now. “So you dropped Spanish in the middle of the semester to take French so you could eavesdrop on your gym classmates.”

“Does this actually surprise you Steve,” Jamie said, smiling that crooked, “up to no good” smile at him. His stomach felt like fire. “How long have you known me?”

“Look even for you-”

Peggy cleared her throat and they stopped. “Sorry to interrupt. But this is my class,” she said. “I’ll see you both next period.” She went in, leaving Jamie and Steve in the hallway on their own, before Jamie cleared her throat.    
  
“My class is the next one,” she told him, and the air turned awkward. She kicked her shoes into the tile. “Uh. So. That dance is this weekend. Are you… Going with anyone?” Jamie was bright red. Steve felt his face heat up, too.

“Oh, uh, no,” he told her. “I… I don’t know. Are… Are you?”

Jamie shifted. The warning bell rang above them. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I wanted to- I mean, maybe- You- Um. Ask Peggy. You should.”

Steve felt maybe that’s not what she wanted to say. “Yeah,” he agreed anyway. She deflated instantly. “Maybe.”   
  
“Yeah. Anyway. Class. See you later,” she said, before quickly turning and heading into her class.

Steve didn’t go to the dance with Peggy - or Jamie - that weekend.

 

* * *

 

**2003**

Seeing Jamie in a dress had to be at the top of the most uncomfortable things Steve has ever seen. It just felt wrong to see her in floral, and not in ripped jeans and hoodies too big. She looked uncomfortable, too, fidgeting at her desk and constantly glancing around. More than once she had caught eyes with Steve, and all Steve had done was smile back at her. Her shoulders seemed less tense after that. He liked to believe it was because of her.

Jonathan was shaping up to be a real asshole to Jamie. Rebecca had moved out the year before after graduating, leaving Jamie at home to weather whatever shit Jonathan threw her way. Part of what was thrown her way was a demand for her to “dress more like a girl” after Jamie’s hair cut that left her with hair almost as short as Steve’s, apparently. Jamie had worn a white blouse that cut too low and showed too much cleavage last week, and Steve had wordlessly handed her his jacket on the bus. She spent even more time at Steve’s apartment, usually borrowing his clothes and leaving hers pushed so far into a corner in his room, she had forgotten them more than once. They played video games, and watched TV and talked about sports, but Steve was watchful, and kept an eye on her. For bruises, for anything that hinted at more than a demanding stepfather and a strict following of gender roles that he apparently believed in. So far, there had been nothing. But Steve still kept an eye on her arms.

Steve caught her fidgeting in her seat again. She was playing with the straps, pulling up the neckline, trying to cover herself more, legs pressed together firmly. He frowned, before tearing a clean piece of paper out of his notebook and scratching out a quick note to her, before dropping it on her desk.

“I have clean gym clothes in my locker. You can borrow them. My place after school?”

Jamie looked up at him and smiled a bit, before nodding. She didn’t pass the note back, but Steve was content enough with it. Lately, a smile was enough to make him content.

After school was warm. His mother had left the windows in the living room open while she busied herself in the kitchen. At some point his and Jamie’s thrift store Playstation had migrated into his room, so they were there, passing a controller between the two of them while they tried to beat the same stage of Crash Bandicoot they had been stuck on for weeks. Jamie was in one of Steve’s shirts, an old rock band his dad had liked, and a pair of his athletic shorts. There was a bowl of popcorn between them, and a two liter of Coke his mom had brought in at some point. She seemed so much more at ease now, laying stomach down into his dark blue comforter on his bed, feet kicking in the air while she watched him mash buttons, but there was a hint of tension, some kind of weird silence that Jamie didn’t seem to fill, but Steve didn’t know how. It was when Steve inevitably died and passed the controller back to her, is when she spoke. “I don’t think I want to be a girl.”

Normally, Jamie was the kind of person that was tough; emotionally and physically. Although Steve had started bulking up lately, Jamie could easily kick his ass in a fight. She had been a strong presence in his life with her fiery personality and bright sense of adventure. He had never seen her so nervous, had heard her sound so nervous. The words replayed in his head, and he cleared his throat, wiggling the controller a bit. She took it, and he noticed her hands were shaking. “Um. Okay. I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“It’s a thing, sorta,” Jamie said, quietly, nervously, like she didn’t know how to approach this now. Was Jamie even a she anymore? Steve’s mind was spinning. “Yeah. It’s a thing. I want to be a boy that’s… That’s not weird, right?”

It was weird, because it seemed so foreign; he had never heard of anything like this, and it wasn’t like he lived a particularly sheltered life, like Sarah Rogers was close minded, or anything. But at the same time, it sorta of fit, made sense; Jamie had never liked skirts or dresses and always worn jeans and shirts and hoodies, had closer friendships with boys (like himself, and Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, Jim Mortia, Falsworth and Dernier, etc), and lately, Steve could even start to point out when Jamie seemed to shrink away being called “miss” or “ma’am” or “she”. It made sense.

“No, it’s not weird,” Steve said. Jamie died on screen, but held onto the controller. 

The clock in the corner ticked. He heard his mom banging a pot around in the kitchen. “I think I want to go by James. James Buchanan,” is the next thing out of Jamie’s mouth. James Buchanan Barnes. “I told Dad. He started calling me Bucky. Is _that_ weird?”   
  
“No,” Steve said again. On screen, the game starts back up.

“Does this change anything?” This time the question is soft, so quiet Steve almost doesn’t hear it. It’s vulnerable, like Steve will change his mind and fuck up whatever kinda trust between them. Jamie - James,  _ Bucky _ \- is his best friend. He doesn’t get it completely, but damn he’ll try.

“No. It doesn’t change anything,” Steve told Bucky. “You’re still you, no matter what name you go by. And you’re still my best friend, no matter what.” The straight line Crash was going in on screen swerves to the left, and he falls off the platform. Bucky sniffled next to him. “And you still suck at this game.”

The controller hit his arm and he jumped, looking over to see Bucky looking back at him, tears in his eyes, but a smile on his face, before he laughed. “You’re such a fucking punk, Rogers,” he told him, nose scrunched up in that way that highlighted the scar across the bridge of his nose that he got when he was eight and the freckles that are just barely still there. 

Steve was pretty sure he loved Bucky. Steve was pretty sure he wanted to kiss him.

But he didn’t. He picked the controller back up and shook his head, a smile on his face as he started the level again. “And you’re still a fucking jerk, Barnes.” He got a kick to the shoulder for that and more laughter, his heart racing and stomach flipping.

Steve didn’t linger on what it meant to still like Bucky and Peggy, because it didn’t matter. He just accepted it. And he moved on.

 

* * *

**2006**

Bucky’s apartment wasn’t glamorous by any standards. It was a run down thing on the edge of Brooklyn that he had scraped together three years worth of pocket change and savings just to pay the first month’s rent on. His landlord was a seedy old man that eyed Bucky with eyes that made Steve’s skin crawl the day he moved in, and he wouldn’t deny that he took a step between them any time Bucky had to talk to him. Steve didn’t like it; didn’t like Bucky living on his own when he could barely get together the money to keep the place (legally), especially when Steve was more than willing to share his room with him in his own apartment, and his mom adored him, or when his dad still lived in Manhattan and wouldn’t mind taking him in. Hell, Peggy lived a couple of floors down and would have been willing to rent him their extra room for half of what he was paying now, but the sentiment is what kept him from protesting every time he visited Bucky; to get as far away from his parents, namely Jonathan, while he was still, technically, supposed to live with them. At least until he graduated. Bucky’s words.

Steve pushed the half broken door open. The apartment was more of a disaster than the normal “there’s a teenage boy living here unsupervised” disaster. There was a broken glass on the carpet in the living room, a box of cereal laying against the wall outside the of the kitchen with brightly colored, off brand fruit pebbles scattered across the floor, a pile of clothes on one end of the couch that had been hastily dug through, if the shorts half hanging off the armrest were anything to go by. Then Steve saw a smudge of blood across the white of the freezer door, that was even cracked open slightly, like whoever had gotten into it didn’t have time to close it. “Bucky?” he called out, feeling his blood run cold at the implications swirling around the scene, and all the things that could have possibly happened to Bucky, before he rounded the corner from the hallway. He stared at Steve for a good long while, tears still shimmering in his eyes and an ice pack pressed to his lip, before his brows knitted together. 

“Steve? What are you doing here?”

“You disappeared after graduation I thought I’d just…” Steve trailed off, looking over Bucky. He was wearing a pair of their high school’s athletic department’s sweatpants, which he definitely got from Steve, and a sports bra. His hair was messy where it had been tidy and neat earlier at their graduation ceremony, and he was sporting bruises up and down his arms, the nastiest over the star tattoo on his left arm he got a few weeks back. Steve’s blood went cold. “What happened?”

Bucky hunched in on himself, trying to make himself look smaller, before he turned away. “Jonathan stopped by,” he told him, moving the ice pack away from his mouth and heading back into his room. Steve followed, like a lost puppy. The picture of Rebecca on his desk was smashed, and the handle to the door was broken. There was an open suitcase sitting on his bed, partially full of half folded, wrinkled clothing, and a pamphlet for the United States Army sat next to it. “He was half drunk, and wanted to know why everyone was calling me Bucky at graduation. So I told him. Four fucking years and I finally got the guts to tell him. And then he had a nuclear meltdown in my living room.” Bucky tossed clothes onto his bed blindly from his closet. 

“He-”   
  
“Hit me. Grabbed me. That’s where the bruises came from. I eventually just ran in here and he broke my door, and my picture of Becca. But, he disowned me, so I don’t have to worry,” he mumbled, turning back to try to organize his suitcase. 

“Bucky, this is your apartment, you don’t…” he trailed off. The Army pamphlet. “You can’t go.”

“I can, and I want to,” Bucky told him, coldly. His hands stopped on a shirt, one Steve immediately recognized as his own, before he stuffed it to the bottom. “You know I’ve wanted to get out of here for years. I’ve been talking to recruiters for weeks. It’s the easiest way out.”

Steve felt like his world was falling apart around him, and there was a dull ring in his ears that made him feel sick, off balance. “Just move in with your dad, Bucky,” he said. “He lives in Manhattan. I’ll come visit you, you don’t have to come to my-”

“I don’t want to live with my dad.”

“Then live with Peggy, or we could-”

“I don’t want to live with either of you, I want to get out of this damn city.”

“The Army won’t be much better!” Steve said, quickly, harshly. Bucky froze, hands clutching what he had been folding. “You really think your life will be any easy there, Bucky?”

“Anything’s better than here!” Bucky said, voice raising. Steve’s mouth slammed shut. “I’ve been in actual hell since my dad moved and my mom married that asshole! I’m so sick of looking at the same streets and the same buildings and the same damn four walls!” His chest was rising and falling harshly. Steve tried to count each inhale, each exhale. “Not everyone can get a cushy scholarship and enroll in a police academy, Steve!”

“Okay, fine, but when were you planning on telling me, then?” he asked. “When were you planning on telling me that you’ve been talking to recruiters for the army, when you were moving out, when you were just leaving?” He thought back to the last semester, how Bucky seemed closed off, acting weird, spacey. He figured it had been a mix of exams and graduating. He wished he could go back and shake some sense into himself. “I’m your best friend, Bucky. And you were just going to leave without saying anything?”

Bucky went quiet. His hands shook on the shirt he held. Steve’s mind goes back to the day Bucky came out to him; he’s just as vulnerable and nervous now. “I wasn’t going to.”

Steve doesn’t say anything.

“You’re the star of the football team, you’re popular, you’re charming. Your mom cares deeply, Peggy really likes you, you’ve got scholarships for the best schools in the country and you’re enrolling in the police academy. You have plans and a future, Steve,” Bucky told him, quietly. “I’m just the fucked up kid going nowhere with abusive parents. I’ve been holding you back for years. If I left without saying anything, you wouldn’t try to stop me. You wouldn’t keep letting me hold you back-”

“Bucky that’s bullshit-”

“Shut up, Steve,” Bucky snapped. His tone isn’t light, isn’t solemn anymore. Steve can feel that anger Bucky so rarely has from where he stood. “Just shut up. Shut up and let me pack my suitcase, and get out of here and never look back.”

“I’m not going to let you just-”

There was hands on his chest, pushing him back. He stumbled a bit, back hitting the wall. Bucky’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes! You are! Just get the fuck out of my apartment, Steve!”

Steve didn’t want to argue, but he didn’t want to leave it like this. Bucky had been a constant in his life for thirteen years, and if he left, he’d be a giant hole missing from his life that Steve wasn’t sure what he’d fill it with, if he even could. But Bucky deserved his choice, deserved to cut ties with everyone he knew to move wherever and do whatever, even if it hurt. He remembered Peggy talking about her brother’s divorce, how he told her “you have to give people the respect of their own decisions”. He wondered, briefly, if this counted, before he stepped back. “Okay,” he told him gently. “Okay. I’ll go.”

Bucky relaxed just enough that it felt like Steve got stabbed in the chest. He turned back to his suitcase. “You know the way out.”

Maybe they’d run into each other in a few years, was all Steve could think, hopefully, as he stepped around clothes and broken glass to the front door. Maybe Bucky would come back. Maybe Steve wouldn’t spend the rest of his life with a void in his heart where Bucky once was. Maybe he’d see him again.

He didn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a tumblr i rarely use, but youre welcome to follow me:  
> [milessqueak](http://peakesqueak.tumblr.com/) (main)  
> [asexualstevebarnes](http://asexualstevebarnes.tumblr.com/) (marvel)


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